December 1, 2020 — The US seafood industry faced massive declines in the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and will need targeted federal assistance to recover, a new study shows.
“Seafood is part of the narrative that I would say doesn’t get as much attention as something like agriculture,” says Halley Froehlich, aquaculture and fisheries professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.
“And that certainly appears to be the case when we’re looking at something like the CARES Act, the federal funding source specifically passed to provide economic relief in the US,” she says.
That is, in large part, due to the fact that policymakers lack sufficient real-time data to see how the seafood industry has fared in the time of lockdowns and social distancing, says lead author Easton White, an ecologist at the University of Vermont.
“One difficulty is that a lot of this data isn’t released until months and years later,” White says. From the boat to the table, data is generated that must be gathered and processed before it gets released, he says.
The pandemic is a rapidly evolving situation and the seafood industry can’t afford to wait. So, to get a big-picture look at the early effects of COVID-19 on US fisheries and seafood consumption, the researchers synthesized multiple sources from across the seafood supply chain, including some unconventional real-time data sets.